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This machine turns coffee waste into energy

This article was first published in the December 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Arthur Kay sells coffee that can power your car and keep your house warm. The 24-year-old is the founder and CEO of bio-bean, a London-based company that transforms waste ground coffee into biofuel. Its raw material comes from hundreds of caffeine-consuming locations around the UK -- office blocks, cafés, instant-coffee factories -- which provide the coffee grounds for free, in exchange for being relieved of waste-management costs.

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Once the grounds enter bio-bean's Cambridge factory they go through a process of sifting and drying to remove excess moisture before getting hammered by a mechanical press and mixed with an organic solvent to do away with plant oils.

Most of the biomass is then compressed into pellets that are used to heat buildings. Bio-bean is also exploring liquid biodiesel for vehicles, and other biochemicals.

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Kay, a 2015 WIRED Innovation Fellow, came up with the idea while studying architecture at UCL.

I liked the idea that in the same way coffee fuels your body, coffee can fuel buildings and transportArthur Kay, Founder, bio-bean

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"My real interest was initially in collection and recycling, not biofuels," he explains. "I was thinking about how to design sustainable cities, how to fuel the city of the future."

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He settled for coffee waste because of the substance's heat-generating properties, and because it was available and easy to collect. "Every tonne of waste coffee grounds recycled using bio-bean's technology saves 6.8 tonnes of CO<sub>2</sub> emissions. It's like driving from London to Beijing -- twice."

Bio-bean's factory can process about 50,000 tonnes of waste grounds per year. But more than 500,000 tonnes are produced annually in the UK, so Kay is scaling up the operation. Right now, however, the goal is enhancing bio-bean's liquid fuel production before establishing global franchises and partnerships. "There's nothing unique about the UK coffee market," Kay says. "There's no reason why this thing couldn't be done around the world."

This article was first published in the December 2015 issue of WIRED magazine